Why scale isn't the only thing to consider when it comes to content distribution

Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singola says there is a way to bring content marketing to scale.Taboola

"Content marketing" is a major CMO buzzword right now but as many brands are learning, it's not as easy as it looks.

Since 2007, Taboola has worked with advertisers and publishers (including Business Insider) to make sure their content is being exposed to the right audience on the right platforms. Julie Hansen, president and COO of Business Insider, recently conducted an e-mail interview with Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda about how content marketing is changing and what Taboola is doing to pave the way.

Julie Hansen: One criticism of content marketing is that it doesn't scale. How can we fix this?

Adam Singolda: Many people make the mistake of measuring content marketing by looking at engagement metrics like “time on site” or “pages per visit.” But as content marketing has evolved, advanced marketers have looked beyond engagement of content to what happened “post-click,” after someone reads an article. By looking at actions such as newsletter signups or purchases, marketers can finally attach an ROI to content-related efforts and justify scaling toward bigger budgets.

Also, channels like Facebook, Twitter, Taboola, and others enable marketers to strategically promote content so it reaches the right people at the right stage in the conversion funnel. Rather than investing in developing a full-fledged “content machine,” marketers can build robust content marketing campaigns with a select number of hyper-targeted content items.

JH: How important is native advertising to mobile monetization? Will more interruptive ad formats become viable as mobile matures?

AS:Mobile is fantastic for consuming text, photos, videos — which means it’s also great for native advertising formats and in-feed placements that drive to sponsored stories. Given the limited real estate on smaller screens, publishers and marketers are thinking strategically about every pixel on the page. In-feed “native” units are a way to both combat viewability issues and monetize effectively while preserving the user experience.

When it comes to interruptive ad formats, we’re quickly heading toward a world where publishers will have zero standardized ad formats on their page. Instead, they’ll monetize their sites through customized and native-based experiences. I think this will be a major revenue opportunity because users are showing high engagement with these formats, and they can bring greater value to advertisers.

JH: How should brands and publishers prioritize all of the distribution platforms available?

AS: Native advertising has two sides: content creation and targeted distribution to make sure the right people are discovering and consuming that content at the right time.

Traditionally, most people have categorized publishers on the content creation side of the equation, and platforms like Facebook as the main channel of distribution. But now most brands have a YouTube channel, Facebook page, microsite, corporate blog, mobile app, and more — thousands of pieces of content they want to promote in the best way possible.

We’re moving away from the early days of native advertising, and brands are looking beyond distribution to credible distribution. Strategically buying audiences and getting the right person to see a piece of content isn’t enough; it’s also about where and how that content is promoted. An automobile company that wants to promote their YouTube channel and drive relevant audiences to their YouTube videos might gain more by serving that content on the homepage of AutoBlog, rather than in a social feed.

To prioritize the different avenues for content distribution, marketers need to continually think about the combination of ROI, scale, and credibility. It makes sense to continue spending on platforms like Facebook and Twitter which offer scale, but I would also take the content I have spent years creating and think about ways to promote those items directly on publisher websites. These new opportunities can lend a piece of content unique and contextual credibility while driving hyper-relevant and highly-engaged audiences to blogs, microsites, YouTube pages, and more.

JH: How is Taboola helping publishers and brands achieve scale?

AS: The challenge for publishers creating and hosting "native" custom content that lives on their own sites is that while this is a high-impact initiative, there often isn't too much money coming in. It can be a complex and costly process.

On the other hand, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others define native in terms of native "placements" (a la "in-feed") where people expect content to appear — sometimes free, sometimes paid. These companies aren't limiting the sponsored posts to stay within its platform, but rather it can direct the user to sites all across the web, which provides a new direction (and additional budgets) that I think publishers should also consider getting into.

So right now, brands are spending billions of dollars annually to distribute content through social channels while smaller budgets currently go to publishers to create "branded content". Similar to social channels, I believe brands should be able to pay (a premium) to promote their owned content in native placements on different publishers’ sites to get that credible, trusted environment for their content.

And publishers need a new type of native ad server that not only renders natively to fit the UI, but also indexes a lot of pieces of content and recommends the right one.

Taboola Native is allowing publishers to offer any brand in the world the opportunity to promote their content to unique audiences, natively. It’s available to our publishers' sales teams for free and connects to DoubleClick so workflows stay the same.

This is the first time a brand can contact a publisher directly and buy specific placement, whether the content stays on the site or lives elsewhere on the web. Taboola Native allows publishers' ad sales teams to expand the conversation with advertisers, securing budgets that are currently being spent elsewhere on social platforms like Facebook.

This could increase publishers’ revenue meaningfully, offering them alternatives that let them make real money and grow.